Materialism and the Matrix

This distrust of the physical is rooted in something even more disturbing. I believe we distrust and dislike and dismiss the physical in our worship because we don’t really believe in the Real Presence of the Body, Blood Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and even more fundamentally, we don’t really believe in the astounding and disturbing fact of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ who took human flesh from his Immaculately Conceived mother–the most Holy and Blessed Virgin Mary.

I don’t propose that suburban American Catholics go around denying these cardinal doctrines of the faith formally. No, they still stand up and say the Nicene Creed every Sunday (if they go to Mass) but they don’t know what it means. They haven’t really examined the claims. They haven’t faced up to the implications. It hasn’t become an earthquake in their lives. They’re like Neo in his ordinary world–still asleep.

To fully affirm the Incarnation and the Eucharistic Presence is to be born again. It’s to wake up. If we examined the implications we would be materialistic in the proper way–and that is to love all things—yes all things–according to their eternal worth. We would love our material blessings. We would enjoy life in a rambunctious and rumbustious way. We would love all that this material world has to offer, but we would also realize that at the heart of the material world is the One who took human flesh and clothed himself in matter, and we would love and affirm that fullness of materialism through a fully and properly materialistic Catholic religion.